The Anatomy of an Amazon 6-pager

A deep dive into writing detailed planning docs from

one of the most successful companies in the world
Jesse Freeman

You have 2 free member-only stories left this month.

Image by CurtisM media from Pixabay

The Amazon 6-pager

I worked at Amazon for five years, leaving days before receiving the coveted
yellow badge. Most people don’t make it past the first year. It’s an intense
work environment, and the company revolves around specific leadership
principles that provide a strict framework for how you interact with your co-
workers. Because of this distinct culture, Amazon is unlike any company I’ve
ever seen.
Perhaps the most challenging part of working at Amazon comes down to
being able to write a 6-pager. While there are several types of documents
you may need to write at Amazon, such as the backward press-release or
the 2-pager, your ability to write a 6-pager will directly impact your status at
the table and your ability to move up in the company. If you struggle to write
detailed plans for your business, this may be a useful structure to emulate.

My plan here is to walk you through the anatomy of an Amazon-style 6-page

document in granular detail. I was surprised to see that the few articles out
there on the process mostly get it wrong. Even stranger, there doesn’t
appear to be a single real example of a 6-pager outside of Amazon. So, I’ve
decided to create one from scratch and share it with you. I based it on a
structure I used when I headed up Framework Partner Marketing for the
Amazon Appstore.

Each group in Amazon has its way of writing 6-pagers. While they may look
or read a bit differently, they all share the same structure. Also, there are
different approaches based on the goal of the document. The example I am
going to share is from what we call an operational plan document. These are
6-month plans that outline the current state of the business, the historical
data from the last period, the goals for this period, and how you plan on
achieving them. There are two of these documents that cover the year called
OP-1 and OP-2. Right about now, Amazon teams would be executing their
2020 OP-2 plan and beginning to draft the 2021 OP-1 plan.

It’s rare to write a large plan like this on your own. We usually work as a team
to contribute to a single OP doc. One owner is responsible for cleaning it up
and making it sounds like it came from an individual author. The heads of
each team will have a plan for their group, and highlights from there will roll
up into a master OP document used by the entire organization. I’ve had to
write several tactical plans myself in various groups at Amazon, and it’s an
incredibly time-consuming process that usually involves dozens of revisions.
It feels like writing a master’s thesis, and a lot of care goes into making sure
it is ready before presenting to a group of superiors.

How Amazon conducts meetings

Amazon is well known for its lack of using PowerPoint. The way this works is
that before a meeting, you print out enough copies for everyone in the room.
You’re not allowed to read the document from your computer unless you are
remote. Also, no one reads the document before the meeting. You are
usually given 20–25 minutes at the beginning of a 60-minute meeting to
read the doc from beginning to end. Most people write down questions or
feedback directly on the printout since using a computer during this time is
frowned upon.

Image by websubs from Pixabay

All print outs are handed back to you at the end of the meeting. The rest of
the time consists of everyone in the room challenging your position,
questioning your tactics, and digging through the data to make sure it is
valid. It’s incredibly stressful, and when the meeting is over, it’s your
responsibility to update and recirculate the document to everyone as a final
version. There is no ideation or brainstorming during these kinds of
meetings. You need to go into them with everything prepared ahead of time,
which usually means you’ve had multiple people review it to ensure that you
are ready.

The last thing you should know, which is perhaps the most critical part of the
entire process, is that your 6-pager needs to stand on its own. One of the
things I admired most at Amazon was their ability to transfer knowledge
between different groups. Any time I interacted with a new group, I could ask
to see their OP doc and get caught up on everything I needed to know. For
this process to work, it means you need to write your 6-pager in a way that
allows anyone, even people not familiar with the subject, to know what is
going on without additional research. I’ll get into some of the ways you can
do that later.

Since this may be your first time reading an Amazon-style 6-pager, the last
bit of context I’ll give you is that I wrote this for a game development tool I
have been building in my spare time called Pixel Vision 8. There are a few
things I dived deeper into than I would in a normal 6-pager to help make
things a bit clearer. Also, some sections are more generic than I’d typically
write, seeing how this isn’t a real plan I can execute on for a hobby project.
Still, it was a good exercise in focusing my activities over the next six
months. Writing a plan like this is one of the most powerful ways you can
organize your thoughts to share with others.

After you finish reading the 6-pager, I’ll break apart each section and explain
them in more detail. Don’t get too hung up on the actual contents if you’re
not familiar with game development, marketing, or reading dense plans. I
also won’t accept any feedback on this one, so there is no need to print it out
and hand it back to me.

So, with that out of the way, take the next 20–25 minutes to read my 2020
OP-2 plan for Pixel Vision 8.

Structuring a 6-pager narrative

How did that go, intense, right? I remember the first time I had to read one. It
looked like a complete wall of text. I am going to assume you didn’t get
through the entire thing so I’ll include some excerpts as we go. To give you
perspective, that took me five days to write, and I did four revisions. Since no
one else had to review it, I’d say the process was almost tolerable. I love to
write, but even these are a challenge for me. While it may feel completely
alien to you, I miss this detail and clarity these types of documents provide
now that I no longer work at Amazon. And while 6-pagers are a chore to
write, I can no longer sit through a PowerPoint presentation without
questioning why it wasn’t put into a document for me to read through.

The first thing you probably noticed is that my 6-pager is using 10 point font.
These things are dense, and there is a strict rule around it being exactly six
pages. The goal is to fill up all six pages without any filler. The other thing
you may have noticed is that the document isn’t six pages, it’s much longer.
The perceived length of a 6-pager is a bit of a misconception. I’ve written 6-
pagers that were over 40 pages long. The reason for this is because of the
appendix.

The main goal of authoring this kind of document is to craft the entire thing
as a narrative. That doesn’t mean it needs to be an entertaining story. It
merely means there are no bullet-point lists, no graphics, and no fluff in the
document’s core 6-pages. Since it’s difficult to sum up the contextual
information like data, graphs, or examples in narrative form, you can add it to
the end of the document in an appendix. This allows the reader to choose
what to look up for additional information as needed. It also allows you to
store bulky, complex data visualizations without breaking up the narrative’s
flow.
At this point, we are ready to break down the skeleton of the 6-pager. Again,
this might change slightly based on the document’s goal, but for the most
part, it works like this:

Introduction — This needs to set up precisely what the material is

going to cover and to inherently state the general direction of where the
document plans on going.
Goals — List right up front what the metrics for success are so we can
use them as a lens to see the remaining document through.
Tenets — This is a very Amazon thing where every action has some
clearly define north star. There are a lot of ways to word these.
Generally, they are inspirational pillars that the rest of the plan sits on
top of (go with me on this one).
State of the business — This section is another important one. You
need to inform the reader of the current state of the business. There
needs to be a lot of detail here, which sets up the points to compare
against in the next section.
Lessons learned — Amazon is big on data. This section will outline the
current state of the business and its influence over creating the goals
you need to achieve. It should be a detailed enough snapshot to give
the reader all of the data they need to understand the positive and
negatives activities in the prior period.
Strategic priorities — This is the meat of the document and lays out
the plan, how to execute it, and should match up to achieving the goals
stated at the top of the document.

Of course, each of these sections has a specific job in building the narrative
of the 6-pager. To pull it all together requires a certain amount of finesse.
Luckily, I’ve made it through meetings needing to make only minor changes,
and I’ve been in meetings where someone’s entire document is ripped apart
line by line. I don’t profess to have the experience to say mine were better
than others, but I did have a few good mentors. So here is how I decided to
write my sample 6-pager.
The introduction
I usually try to consolidate my introduction to two paragraphs. Since this 6-
pager was probably the first you’ve ever read on a topic you probably have
no background on, I indulged and added the 3rd paragraph to pack in some
extra detail.

Figure 1. The introduction section from my sample 6-pager

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this section; it should be self-
explanatory. I wanted to point out the two references to the appendix right
off the bat. There is a lot of data to process upfront, especially if you’re not
familiar with the subject. So you will want to add as much contextual data as
possible in the document itself. You’ll notice there are no links in the
documents to any websites either. The expectation is that you are reading a
printout. So, if you need an offline copy of the entire internet for reference,
put it all in the appendix.

The goals
Next up are the goals. The goal section is one of the only two areas of the
document where bullet points are allowed. I follow a predefined structure for
writing these, and I’ve seen it consistently used across several other groups.

Figure 2. The goals section from my sample 6-pager

You start with the actual goal, bolded, in as few words as possible. Then you
follow with a single sentence that adds context to the goal. Finally, there
needs to be a historical data point and a projected data point, followed by an
explicit calculation of the change between the two. Not all goals end up with
a positive outcome; I made my first one a negative one to show off two
different types of results. But you want to have at least three goals which
appear to be the magic number considering you will probably have multiple
other priorities throughout the year from other groups since these plans do
not exist in a vacuum.

I’ve seen all kinds of ways of writing goals at companies I’ve worked at, and
this is honestly the only format that has ever made sense to me. It feels like
OKRs are another popular one but I find it very difficult to adjust to them
after spending years at Amazon.

The tenets
After the goals, you declare the tenets. I’ve never seen another company so
cultish in the way it requires employees to think according to a framework of
rules. On the first day of orientation, they walk you through the leadership
principles, and this way of thinking helps reinforce the documents you write.
Figure 3. The tenets from my sample 6-pager

I rarely put much effort into these. While the leadership principles become
rules for how you engage with your co-workers, these tenets add nothing to
the document. The people that write excellent tenets can link them back to
the leadership principles somehow. Since one of the principles I liked the
most is “disagree and commit,” I kept my opinion to myself and always added
tenets to my 6-pagers since the decision to use them happened long before
I got there.

Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they

disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders
have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake
of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.

The state of the business

After the tenets, things get serious fast. The document begins with the state
of the business. For this example, 6-pager, I decided to make it a single
page. I would hardly call my hobby game engine a “business,” but I did my
best to take it seriously.
Figure 5. Setting up the introduction for the state of the business section in my sample 6-pager

Appendix references litter this section. In a real 6-pager, I would have cut out
the first paragraph and jumped right into the numbers. This section is really
about distilling all of the current activities and their intended goals. However,
this is not a section to talk in the past tense. The state of the business
should be a current snapshot of the data. Because of this, I usually keep all
of the figures blank until right before the meeting. This way, my document is
always as up to date as possible.

I still look at this section through the lens of the Appstore, where I was in
charge of tracking the game engines that supported Fire OS, the game
submission numbers, and my budget. I had to report weekly on the
business’s health, so it was natural to have these numbers ready at a
moment’s notice. Had this been a real 6-pager, I would have included a full
snapshot of this data, which could go on for pages, in the appendix. Amazon
is big on data; those are real facts. You are building a narrative around those
facts so that we are not just skimming an excel spreadsheet.

The last thing I want to call out in this section was how I ended it. It’s a subtle
detail, but I make sure to complete the section with a little summary of
everything that has been done and try to tie it into the goals. Since my goals
were core to the way I ran my business, they didn’t change much every six
months. The only thing that change was the target numbers. This made it
easier to keep a consistent theme on how I ran things and made sure my
summary of the business reflected that.

Lessons learned
After summing up the state of the business, it’s time to reflect on what
happened in the past. This is a snapshot from the last period until now and
has to be even more factual with numbers, percentages of goal completion,
and even additional references in the appendix.

Figure 6. Setting up the introduction for the lessons learned section in my sample 6-pager

This section is similar to the state of the business but with one exception; the
tense here is always in the past. There shouldn’t be any forward projections
or expectations. There is zero room for interpretation. The data will tell the
real story. Part of working at Amazon is that you are encouraged to share
your failures along with your successes. I’ve worked in many places where
people try to hide what didn’t work. You can usually tell because they never
have data to back up their claims. At Amazon, the culture understands that
you will fail; in fact, there is a leadership principle called “deliver results ” to
address that reality.

Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with
the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the
 occasion and never settle.

Notice the “despite setbacks” part? That is very important because real
leaders fail from time to time but learn from their mistakes. Those failures
help inform the new set of goals and give you clarity as to why it failed, so
you don’t repeat your mistake. That’s outlined in the “ownership” and “are
right, a lot” leadership principles too but you can look those up on your own.

Strategic priorities
At this point, you should have a real clear picture of what is going on, what
has happened leading up to this, and what we hope to achieve moving
forward. It’s now time for the most detailed section of all, the strategic
priorities.

Figure 7. The beginning of my strategic priorities from my sample 6-pager

There is a lot to unpack here, mostly because this is usually 50–70% of the
6-pager. This section outlines each activity you plan on doing and how it
relates to one of the goals. I don’t believe the order makes a difference, you
can structure the narrative how you like, but people in the meeting will
calculate up each activity to make sure it matches up to the goal’s projected
data point. This is also the section that is open for interpretation and will be
the one you spend the majority of the meeting defending.
Up until this point, everything you have written has been facts, except for the
tenets. The only questions you will get on those sections are whether the
data adds up or they perceive the goals as not challenging enough. The
strategic priorities section is all speculation. And at Amazon, they don’t
accept anecdotes for an answer. That is why to write this section, you need
to pull numbers from the lessons learned and state of the business that help
prove your proposed activities will work.

I’ll admit, I didn’t fully back my assumptions up with data from the previous
sections. Honestly, since I don’t have to report this to anyone, I don’t analyze
my game engine data all that much. I just do it for fun. But what I did want
you to learn from this section was how to structure these priorities. You’ll see
they follow a particular pattern.

A strategic priority consists of two parts. The first part is a prediction. Think
of this as your thesis on how you will contribute back to a given goal. The
second part, however, is where you attempt laying out the actual plan to
achieve it. These can get very detailed, and a lot of the plans I’ve put
together use these to summarize the approach and the appendix for tactical
execution steps. I’ve placed entire content plans in the appendix since they
didn’t contribute to the narrative, but people will want to see the details.

The beauty of the appendix, and probably the most brilliant part of the
Amazon 6-pager, is that it gives the reader the choice of how deep they
want to go down the rabbit hole. What you read in the 6-pager narrative
gives you a high-level overview. If you chose to follow an appendix, that
reference goes right into the details. And since the meeting comprises of
team leads from other groups, each one will have specific areas of interest to
dig into and skim over parts that don't pertain to them. Since everyone at the
table needs to understand the entire scope, they chose to follow an
appendix reference for more information as needed. Either way, they still
walk away with an overall sense of that part of the plan. It’s incredibly
brilliant, and probably the one structural detail most plans I read at other
companies don’t do very well.

Ending a 6-pager
Congratulations on making it this far. Luckily, we are almost at the end. Let’s
take a look at the last strategic priority in my 6-pager.

Figure 8. Excerpt of the last strategic priority from my sample 6-pager

There are two things you should notice. First, I wrote right up to the bottom
of page 6 to stick the landing. Second, you’ll see there is no summary
section or closing remarks. That would be fluff. I’ve never read a 6-pager
that summed everything up. They may exist, but out of the hundreds I’ve
read, I never felt like a summary was missing. I got a clear picture of the past,
present, and future activities and what better way to end then on an
actionable item.

I always make sure that the last sentence ends on a positive, forward-facing
note. One that doesn’t sum everything up but at least feels like a natural
ending to the document. Also, I didn’t add many appendix items to this
example strategic priority section. That was on purpose; it would be more
work than this example warranted. Regardless, you should now have a clear
sense of how this section is supposed to be structured.
Some final advice
I think the last few bits of advice I’ll leave you with are how important the
leadership principles come into play when reviewing a document and
receiving feedback without taking it personally. The leadership principles
give you a sort of rules of engagement on how to be direct with a co-worker
and walk away civil. While I don’t fully drink the kool-aid, it’s impossible to
survive at Amazon without weaponizing these principles in your meetings.
Sometimes it’s to attack and others times to defend, but most of all, you
want to always “dive deep.”

Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit

frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ. No task is
beneath them.